It is common to equip aircraft cabins with screens intended for use by the passengers. These screens may be intended to inform the passengers on the flight parameters, but also may allow them to access multimedia contents.
These screens are often fitted into a fixed element of the cabin, which makes them not very convenient for being consulted by the passengers. Members for supporting these screens have therefore been developed, comprising an arm provided with an end for attachment to a fixed element of the cabin and an end for jointing with the screen. These supporting members are generally adapted so as to support the screen facing a cabin armchair, so as to allow easy consultation of the screen by a passenger sitting in said armchair.
For security reasons, certification of aircraft requires that each screen present in the aircraft is retracted or stored away during certain critical flight phases of the aircraft, notably upon take off and landing. In certain cases also, the passenger may wish for his/her own comfort that the screen bet retracted, for example so that this screen does not prevent his/her displacement inside the aircraft.
Consequently, the supporting members are designed so as to allow the displacement of the screen between a position of use facing the cabin armchair and a storage position. A known storage position is a retracted position inside an armrest of the armchair. However, providing such a storage position for the screen poses significant constraints on the design of the armchair, and more particularly of its armrest, notably preventing the making of certain forms of armrests or retractable armrests.
In the last few years, with the development of tactile tablets, passengers increasingly board aircraft with their own tactile tablet, a tablet which they generally wish to consult during the flight. Most often, the passengers do not have any support at their disposal, and therefore have to lay their tablet on their knees, which forces them to permanently to bow their head downwards and may cause in the long run back or neck pain. Additionally, the tablet may easily fall on the floor of the cabin and be deteriorated in the case of sudden acceleration or deceleration of the aircraft, for example when the latter is in an area with turbulences.
In order to overcome these drawbacks, devices for supporting tablets for aircraft have been developed recently.
These supporting devices generally appear as a jointed arm having a proximal end attached to the side ledge of the cabin («side ledge») and a distal end provided with a jaw with suitable dimensions for grasping with retaining different models of tablets. As this arm has to be stored away during critical flight phases, the arm is most often able to be disassembled, which poses the problem of the storage of said arm, but also of the tablet which it supports.
A partial solution is brought by a known system formed with a device for supporting tablet comprising a retractable jointed arm in a housing made in the side ledge of the cabin. However, the small volume of the housing is incompatible with receiving a tablet inside said housing. If the problem of storing the arm is therefore solved with this known system, the problem remains of storing the tablet during the critical flight phases.
It would thus be desirable to be able to retract not only the supporting device inside the side ledge of the cabin, but also the tablet. However, the side ledge is extremely congested, notably since it is already used for storing tables of the aircraft during critical flight phases, as described in patent application FR 15 00208. The space available for storing other elements, such as tactile tablets, inside the side ledge is therefore very reduced.